Wow! First off, can we say how grateful we are for all of the support this fandom giving us. It’s been a week since we launched our Indiegogo campaign and we’ve already made 150% of our original goal! This means all our previous and projected production costs will be covered, we’ll be able to provide food on shoot days, and VidCon registration costs have been covered for everyone from the team who’s attending!

Any money we raise from here on out will be going directly into the pockets of the all those who lent their significant talent to our project. We have 35 days left in our campaign and the skies the limit.

We have some new and exciting incentive videos in the works which we’ll announce as soon as we have the logistics locked down! Trust me, you’re going to want to see these.

In the meantime, keep being awesome and don’t forget to check the AoJE Production Videos channel on YouTube for the incentive videos you’ve already unlocked!

The abundance of beautiful red eyespots on this Penicillate Jellyfish is striking but not unusual for a Hydrozoan. A feature that is noteworthy is that nobody has seen a polyp stage for this animal, just this medusa stage. The polyps could be small and difficult to spot, or this species might just skip that life stage.

And: they’ve got rhythm. A study in 1988 found that while swimming, the animals flex their bells at a frequency very near the mechanical resonant frequency of their body, which increases the amplitude of their movement by 40% and decreases energy use by around 25%. Is this unusual for jellyfish? Hard to say. We might have to go out and test them all…

This was an incredibly difficult video for me to write and record. I haven’t been this uncomfortable or nervous about an episode since we decided to launch the Wolf series. I did it because I know my fellow female creators are with me: these comments are not easy to ignore, and they do have a negative impact on our desire to make videos and blaze trails.

Things can be said about women being more sensitive than men, or that men deal with these comments too, or that we should just accept that they’re going to happen.. but if I do, I’ll quit. If I accept that this is just part of the deal, this is what it is and always has been, it’s a requirement of my job to toughen up and barrel through, I won’t be able to continue. The remarks are enough to make me want to throw my hands up and retreat to a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere. If the compromise is that I need to become desensitized, I would probably just do something else instead.

Let’s not create that kind of environment for our peers. Let’s be supportive, encouraging. Focus on the content, not the presenter. Ignoring the fact that these comments are uncomfortable is dismissive and counter-productive: let’s have less tolerance for both those comments, and the apathetic attitude attached to how they affect our community.

And, please: check out the women in the video description for more fantastic channels to subscribe to.